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When I was young, I imagined that life progressed as a series of discrete linear segments. Puberty would pass and I’d never again worry about zits or feeling awkward. I’d turn eighteen and be fully equipped to participate in the political process. I assumed that I’d wake up one day and cross a threshold into adulthood. Life is too fluid for such clear demarcations, yet the idea spoke to the relationship I felt to time as I was growing up—I yearned to fast-forward through all the slow, boring bits and get to the adventures I coveted and believed that I deserved.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that such attempts to segment a life are arbitrary, even if they satisfy some need for order. When my son turned ten, earlier this year, I suddenly became worried about adolescence. This was partly because of the hit Netflix show by that name, about a troubled thirteen-year-old, which came out a few months prior to his birthday, bringing with it countless think pieces about the glum interiority of tween boys. Adolescence, I read, was a crossroads that required constant vigilance, where too soft a touch or too much screen time might result in some kind of teen-age radicalization.

In fact, my kid was no different than he’d been as a nine-year-old: sweet, loving, oblivious. I learned that the length and character of adolescence is fuzzy, with some experts saying it ends as late as one’s thirties. In other words, it’s most useful as a kind of narrative device—a socially sanctioned time for difficulty and sullenness and parental worrying, akin to that span when a baby’s grouchiness is automatically attributed to teething.

The fifteenth California Biennial, currently on show at the Orange County Museum of Art, is about adolescence. California trades on its outsized mythology, and previous installments have surveyed how emerging artists reckon with the state’s status and symbolism. The current biennial, curated by Courtenay Finn, Christopher Y. Lew, and Lauren Leving and titled “Desperate, Scared, But Social,” considers what it’s like to grow up somewhere that’s often used as a metaphor for youth itself. The exhibit doesn’t treat youth as a vague, wide-open expanse but instead focusses on the subtle transformations that begin just shy of the teen years—the new calibration of interiority and exteriority, the emergent understanding of independence and accountability. It is a time of awkwardness and boredom, fearlessness and insecurity, when stasis feels like torture, a last gasp of innocence before you should really know better.

I was immediately drawn to selections from “What She Said,” an ongoing series that the photographer Deanna Templeton began in 2000. She approaches young women on her daily walks around Huntington Beach, and in other cities she visits, and asks to photograph them. Amplified to the size of a poster, her subjects look confident and tough, larger than life. One, with roughly chopped bangs and a fur coat, wields an ice-cream cone like an ornate scepter. Another stares straight ahead, revealing no emotion, a mystery deepened by the bags under her eyes and the safety pin stabbed through her nose. Templeton’s heroines are shown a vision of themselves as singular and glamorous, and their portraits capture something essential about adolescence, a time in which you start noticing how others notice you.

Templeton intersperses these pictures with fragments from her teen diaries. “I feel so old, but I’m only 16 / I say I don’t want to live, / They ask what do I mean,” she writes in one entry. Each successive paragraph, composed in a different color ink, as though it were an art project, verges toward the question of whether she should take her own life. In the center of the room, a display case features ticket stubs and flyers from the shows that Templeton attended as a teen-ager: Black Flag, the Jesus and Mary Chain. Decades later, these could be misread as badges of effortless cool, an archive of one’s subcultural bona fides. Yet they are arranged next to a letter bidding farewell to her parents. “Please don’t forget about me,” Templeton writes, laying bare the potential terrors that lurk underneath her street portraiture, the insecurities obscured by a swaggering gait or a confrontational T-shirt.

The biennial’s rooms feel like a collection of pre-internet distress signals, low-level emergency beacons, messages in bottles. It reminded me of my own desire to figure myself out in private and hide the evidence, something that seems far more difficult today, when our actions are tracked and archived. Some of the most moving objects in the exhibition are the juvenilia of now established artists like Miranda July and Brontez Purnell. Rather than the colorful paintings that the queer Chicano artist Joey Terrill would become known for, we see Terrill’s notebooks, maps, carefully transcribed lists of bookstores, evidence of a young mind in search of new terrains. A series of zines anticipates Seth Bogart’s punk energy, his frenetic pursuit of comrades and of new forms. Laura Owens shows some of her teen-age paintings, the stuff of middle-school art class, like a large painting of a Keith Haring-designed Swatch watch.

“Desperate, Scared, but Social” borrows its name from the sole album by Emily’s Sassy Lime, a riot-grrrl band that the sisters Amy and Wendy Yao, and Emily Ryan, formed as high-school students in Los Angeles in the early nineteen-nineties. Growing up in straitlaced immigrant households, they initially created the band in secret, rehearsing when their parents thought they were at the library, sharing song ideas over answering machines, playing shows before they truly knew how to play. Their 1995 album has the rickety punk sound of suburban nightmares, jagged landslides of noise for vanquishing all the dread, real and imagined, just outside their windows.

Emily’s Sassy Lime might be fairly obscure, but its brief tangle with underground rock stardom is central to the exhibit’s exploration of teen-age self-fashioning. The band has its own cavernous room, where its members have essentially erected a pop-up museum of nineteen-nineties culture, alongside pieces of their own art. Display cases are cluttered with VHS tapes, cassettes, and trinkets. The walls are covered with blown-up pages of correspondences with friends, pages pulled from their teen-age zines, photos from summer tours. In the center is Ryan’s sculpture “AZN Clam (Redux),” an enormous clam shell with a bed inside, a stereo, tapes, snacks, an answering machine, and guitars strewn about on the pastel bedspread. It conjured the fantastical inner life of the teen-age girl, the dreams that lie underneath the inscrutable protective armor.

One corner of the room showcases pieces from Amy Yao’s ongoing series exploring Disneyland. When she was young, Yao recalls, her resourceful father would sometimes bring the family to watch the theme park’s fireworks displays from just beyond the gates. She renders an array of famed park buildings, like the Matterhorn and the Haunted Mansion, in takeout containers, packing peanuts, and old tin cans, playing with the idea of immigrant frugality. Old photographs at and around the park are blown up and hung high along the wall, the dreamy washed-out effect conveying her feelings of young astonishment.

My son came with me to the biennial, and in return I promised to take him to the amusement park at Universal Studios in Hollywood. He’s accustomed to tagging along to things I want to see, with a begrudging enthusiasm that has begun to fade as his own sense of autonomy evolves. He didn’t detect the layers of ironic meaning in Yao’s reëxamination of Disneyland; maybe he’d grown up too comfortable to recognize her comment on immigrant thrift. He was simply delighted that junk could be in an art museum. His curiosity was sufficiently piqued that he listened to some Emily’s Sassy Lime songs in the corner (“Pretty good”). If he lingered before a piece for more than a few seconds, I would swoop over and ask what drew him to this specific work. His responses ranged from “I don’t know, it’s interesting” to just “I don’t know,” and then he’d ask when we could go to the gift shop. Although parenthood has changed my views on nature versus nurture, I have come to believe certain things must be hereditary—in this case, a love of souvenirs.

Eventually, he pulled me into a room to show me his favorite work, “El Payaso de la Chancla,” a charcoal drawing by Griselda Rosas, a multidisciplinary artist who works in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. It appeared to depict a demented creature streaked in blacks and grays, with a lopsided face, bulbous eyes, spikes protruding from its neck. Given Rosas’s work on border culture and the legacies of colonization, I wondered if this was some mythological being. But it turned out to be her rendition of a monster that her son invented when he was eleven.

My kid drifted over to study a series of Rosas’s pieces nearby, his hands carefully folded behind his back. Riots of color, a horse or a human figure here or there, stringy webs of fabric. These had begun as her son’s watercolor paintings, and Rosas had slowly added her own layers of embroidery. I was drawn to a colorful tapestry that looked like some kind of psychedelic hide being stretched a dozen ways, with bits of fabric that had been tightened and sewn so that the surface was all ripples and bubbles. I leaned in and saw a zipper, and then what appeared to be a distressed logo from a T-shirt. It turned out to be a tapestry made from the scraps of her son’s shirts and sweaters as he quickly outgrew them. I recognized the desire to stop time—the melancholy of a child growing too fast. For many, adolescence marks a turn inward, a withdrawal into private realms. Rosas, here, was trying to keep her son in her world for a moment longer, compelling him to understand something about her: she is his mother, but she is an artist, as well.

It was early in the morning, but distant screams still rang through Universal Studios each time a roller coaster hit a particularly harrowing dip. We walked among families wearing matching blood-stained Freddy masks and hockey shirts, packs of kids in Hogwarts robes, scowling teen-agers hugging giant Bart Simpson dolls. My son is not the most reliable narrator, yet I understood what his hyperbole (“I wish we lived here”) was meant to convey, in terms of his feelings on beauty and the sublime. I shared his awe: the grand architecture of Hogwarts, the way Super Nintendo World’s garish colors and sound effects made it feel as though we were inside a video game.

It’s one of the pleasures of adulthood, reëncountering things through a child’s eyes. At first, I was possibly even more mesmerized than my son, as I hadn’t been to an amusement park of this scale in maybe thirty years. I marvelled at a hulking Transformer clanking around, beckoning us to come near, and I told my son we definitely had to come back someday to experience the gnarled mess of tracks where a ride based on the “Fast and the Furious” movies was under construction.

After a couple of rides, however, I remembered that I actually hate roller coasters. I spent the entirety of “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey” with my eyes shut, praying that my son wouldn’t throw up. We just barely made it. As we stumbled out, I was in a cold sweat, and I parked myself on a bench to regain my bearings. Los Angeles’s eternal sunshine is even worse when the whole sky spins a single, oppressive shade of blue.

I needed to be stationary, and I told my son he could go on the next ride by himself. He ran off as I woozily pointed to a vague meeting point where I’d be waiting for him. As people of all ages passed by, it was easy to understand the modern American dream of a perpetual childhood. What was once kids’ stuff is now a lifetime relationship to a franchise, such that we are encouraged to take seriously the interior lives of the Transformers, the formative traumas of the Super Mario Bros. No wonder adolescence can stretch into one’s thirties. Packs of adults queued for rides, with no children in sight. I wasn’t immune, obviously, as evidenced by my excitement about taking a picture with a statue of Chief Wiggum from “The Simpsons.”

Of course, gaining this enlightened perspective on my surroundings did little to make me feel less nauseated. Where was he? Had I told him I’d meet him near the entrance or the exit? I realized I had no idea how long the lines were inside, let alone how long the ride took. A hundred people filed out, and I second-guessed not being more protective: phones turn kids into zombies, but maybe I’d been irresponsible sending him into the world without one. Watching toddlers bobble along, arching to reach their parents, I felt a pang of nostalgia for those days when my son was very small, hand permanently in mine, and anything seemed possible. In those early years, we’re told to bombard them with language and positivity, for who’s to say they won’t become the President, an astronaut, or a World Cup winner?

Over time, the future ceases to feel so wide open, though this isn’t as depressing as it sounds. My son seemed to figure out that I was just being encouraging, and my words began to compete with those picked up from friends or the internet; his sense of self-confidence slipped loose from my limitless faith in him. We relinquish control, not just of their movement through the world but of the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who they might become. We start letting them run toward their own horizons. At Universal, though, I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong time for nonchalance. Shouldn’t I have checked whether this ride is really meant to take twenty-five minutes? Had he misunderstood and waited for me out front? Had I let him go too soon? Invariably, he’d come bounding out the exit, whistling to himself, brightening when he saw me. “Dad, I saw something really interesting in the gift shop.” ♦

The British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died, in September, at the age of seventy-eight, after a groundbreaking and globe-spanning career, leaving behind a catalogue that ranges from images of war-torn Afghanistan during the mid- to late nineties to scenes from Japan in the early two-thousands. But Steele-Perkins, a member of the Magnum photo agency, was particularly attuned to discovering the alien, and the alienated, at home, in the United Kingdom. There, he was at once an insider—he attended Christ’s Hospital, among the country’s most prestigious boarding schools—and an outsider, having been born in what was then still colonial Burma to a British military father and a local Burmese mother. It made sense, then, that Steele-Perkins was drawn to the depiction of subcultures and the marginalized, or what he once described as “small worlds which have the whole world in them.” Among those he immortalized were the so-called Teds, the U.K.’s first recognizable tribe dedicated to teen-age rebellion, who became the subject of his first photo book, made in collaboration with the writer Richard Smith and published in 1979.

Barry Ransome in a pub called the Castle, on Old Kent Road, London, 1976.

Teddy Boys, as they were otherwise known, had emerged in Britain in the nineteen-fifties. They were working-class youths who scandalized mainstream society with their elaborate neo-Edwardian frock coats and drainpipe trousers, their outlandishly styled hair—a quiff up front, and a D.A., or duck’s arse, at the nape of the neck—and their skirmishes and ruckuses in dance halls and night clubs. By the late seventies, other youth subcultures had followed in their wake: the mods and rockers, the hippies, the punks. The Ted revival that Steele-Perkins captured in that period combined generational rebelliousness with a kind of doubled nostalgia: for both the teens and for the fifties, an era in which men still wore suits and women still wore dresses, and going out on a Friday night was an occasion for peacocking and parade. “A night out with the Teds was generally a good crack—sometimes some violence, some vomit on the carpet, but generally a rock’n’roll party,” Steele-Perkins wrote as he looked back at his time in their midst for an article that appeared in the Observer Magazine in 2003.

The Teds shared a fascination with the iconography of American youth culture—among their carefully curated outfits are leather jackets and shades that would not have shamed James Dean—but the context in which Steele-Perkins captures his subjects is recognizably English. There is the dinginess of the damask wallpaper in a pub where one Ted stands on the backrest of a leather-covered banquette; a member of his confraternity sits below, leaning into the intimate ambit of a girl who wears a fur coat. He looks into her eyes but is patently more interested in her mouth, and possibly other orifices; in another shot, he paws at her coat lapel with nail-bitten, dirt-encrusted hands that belie the showy glamour of his drape, or jacket. In one photograph of a dance floor in full swing, the wallpaper in the background is printed with a leafy, floral pattern by William Morris, the textile artist who sought to elevate the decorative arts in Britain in the late nineteenth century. The floor, meanwhile, is covered with parquet-wood tiles familiar to anyone who was required to sit cross-legged in an assembly hall in Britain in the seventies. You can almost smell the varnish. The gymnastic movements of one young dancer, who is bent over at the waist, legs splayed apart and arse radically elevated, is a reminder that he has only recently graduated from the child’s playground to the dance floor, which is itself a playground for avid, horny adolescents.

Most of the Teds depicted are young—discovering the look, and discovering themselves, in the full flush of masculine cockiness. Steele-Perkins is especially strong when he captures a group shot in which the effort to pose for the camera is about to dissolve into something more unruly. One image, for instance, looks like a still from a Tarantino take on a buddy movie, with five young men clutching bottles of light ale and one pulling a face: silly instead of suave. (In another photograph, four guys are seen in the inevitable aftermath of a light-ale binge: pissing together in a roadside lay-by.) Most of the Teds are white, though in a different shot three out of the five men shown are of South Asian origin—presumably first- or second-generation immigrants from former British colonial territories who have, no doubt, shocked their elders with their ready assimilation to a widely maligned expression of British culture.

Then there are those who are well past the first burst of youth, but have either adopted or retained the stylings of youth culture. One dance-floor image includes a gentleman of advanced years, seen in profile as he leans back with an enviable flexibility, the jiving of his early years standing him in good stead now. In another photo, a middle-aged Ted couple are portrayed, proudly surrounded by their four children, who are also dressed up in the trappings of the style. Most striking among them is the eldest son, dressed in a long velvet frock coat and a battered pair of brothel creepers. He appears to be no older than thirteen—the age at which he is due to embark upon his own teen-age rebellion. The picture doesn’t tell us, but the assertive look in his eye suggests that maybe he will discard his parents’ favored fashions, exchanging them for the floppy fringe and eyeliner of the New Romantics, who in the early eighties scandalized the newly older generation with their flouting of gender boundaries and sartorial conventions.

Whatever the boy’s own teen-age style choices, they will surely be indelible to him, as the Teds’ were to them. Steele-Perkins revisited his subjects for the Observer Magazine more than two decades after he shot them, and he wrote that, at first, he was sad to see how some of them still clung to their youthful identities. But, on further consideration, he revised this view: the Teds were, after all, still up for a good time, still being exactly who they still wanted to be. “Those markers that once quickened our youth can still drive our dotage,” he wrote. “So we move on, the planets turn, we change, grow older and remain more resolutely the same.”

In 2008, the ten-year-old son of Rahm Emanuel, then a Democratic congressman, bet Mike Pence, then a Republican congressman, that Barack Obama would carry Pence’s home state of Indiana in that year’s Presidential election. Pence lost the bet—ten dollars—but never paid up. “Every time I see him, I tease him,” Emanuel recounted recently. “ ‘You owe ten plus cumulative interest.’ ” Emanuel was seated at a table with Pence for a joint appearance on “Ceasefire,” a new C-SPAN show. Teasing aside, the pair bathed each other in mutual respect. Emanuel said that, off camera, they had asked after each other’s children, some of whom are in the armed forces, leading Dasha Burns, the host, to dub them “parents before partisans.” At the end of the show, Burns flashed a photo of Pence trying to hand Emanuel a ten-dollar bill in the green room.

Such exchanges are foundational to the premise of “Ceasefire,” which has pitched itself as a “rare moment of unity” in a divided nation, and has described its “one goal” as helping warring politicians to find “common ground.” Since it launched, in October, viewers have heard about the Democrat Jared Moskowitz playing Santa Claus at the Republican Tim Burchett’s Christmas party, and the closeness of the wives of Senators James Lankford and Chris Coons; at the end of each episode, Burns highlights an instance of bipartisan comity, such as members of a “civility caucus” in the Minnesota state legislature singing together. Sam Feist, a veteran of CNN who took over C-SPAN last year, told NPR,“I am one of those people who believe that Americans actually agree on more than they disagree. I mean, we had Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in the nineties reach a balanced budget for the first time in a generation.” Indeed, Feist has said that the idea for “Ceasefire” grew out of his work at CNN in that era, when he was a producer on something like the show’s opposite: “Crossfire,” a program that paired ideologically opposed hosts and guests, and gave them license to go for the jugular. According to Feist, Michael Kinsley, one of the liberal hosts on “Crossfire,” suggested, after leaving the show in the mid-nineties, that Feist should put together a more harmonious alternative. He’s carried the idea with him ever since.

Feist has stopped short of describing the new show as his “penance” for “Crossfire,” pointing out that C-SPAN—a network that broadcasts congressional proceedings and similarly wonkish programming as a public service, to an audience that is evenly balanced politically and boasts a high number of self-described moderates—has a different mission than CNN and the other corporate giants of cable news. Regardless, in today’s fractured media environment, the ability of any cable news show to set the terms of the national political debate is limited. The medium is in decline. The internet is ascendant, and anarchic.

And yet the models of exchange represented by “Crossfire” and “Ceasefire”—the vision of debate as a blood sport, in the first case, and as an avenue toward consensus, in the latter—are at the heart of a question that is much bigger and more enduring than one TV show, or even one medium: What does it mean for people to do politics with one another in public? That question now feels especially fraught, amid growing censorship and worrying political violence. I’ve been a media critic for most of the Trump era, and, throughout that time, have grappled with two concerns that are not necessarily contradictory but do often feel in tension with each other. The first is that institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth are giving a platform to toxic figures who spread blatant lies. The second is that mainstream U.S. political culture dismisses fire-breathing radicals on both sides as fundamentally illegitimate—especially notable to me given the overt rudeness of discourse in my native Britain—and promotes civility and triangulated compromise as good outcomes in themselves. (In reality, balancing the budget has winners and losers, like every other policy.)

It now seems clear that attempts to contain toxicity have failed utterly. Insisting that people be nice to one another in such a climate is often well intentioned. But, in my view, it is a utopian expectation, and perhaps a dangerous one, which actors with no interest at all in civility might even co-opt as yet another means of quieting dissent. In other words, watching “Ceasefire,” I found myself wishing that C-SPAN had remade “Crossfire” instead.

There almost wasn’t a “Crossfire” to remake. In the early eighties, Reese Schonfeld, the C.E.O. of CNN, then a fledgling network, hired Pat Buchanan, the hard-line conservative and future Presidential candidate, and Tom Braden, a moderate liberal, to anchor a show that would subject a newsworthy figure to cross-examination from different political perspectives. According to Schonfeld, Ted Turner, who founded CNN, hated the plan—he apparently thought that Buchanan and Braden were “turkeys”—and wanted to abandon it, but by that point the hosts had signed contracts, and so Turner relented. Initially, the show was scheduled in the half hour before midnight on the East Coast, but it was soon moved forward a few hours, and scored big ratings. The goal was not necessarily to unleash shouting matches, but some of the early episodes were quite contentious. In 1982, Braden unloaded on the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, calling him “a damned disgrace to the country” and mocking him repeatedly for wearing a “bedsheet.” A few years later, the musician Frank Zappa debated the permissibility of obscene song lyrics, and failed to disguise his contempt for his interlocutor, a conservative columnist. “Do you want to spank me here?” Zappa goaded him. “I love it when you froth like that.”

Over the years, the format changed—including via the addition of a live audience—as did the cast. In 2004, the Democratic strategist Paul Begala and a fresh-faced, bow-tie-wearing journalist named Tucker Carlson were at the desk on what would turn out to be the night that “Crossfire” died, at the hand, of all people, of the comedian Jon Stewart. Stewart had criticized the show before—according to one of his producers, he had a “real bee in his bonnet” about it—but Begala and Carlson nonetheless seemed taken aback when he came into the studio, sat across from them, and dismissed them as “partisan, erm, what do you call it, hacks,” who were “hurting America” by staging theatrical fights that undermined substantive discussion. Carlson defended “Crossfire” as an effort to hold politicians’ feet to the fire, and accused Stewart of soft-soaping John Kerry, then the Democratic Presidential nominee, in a recent interview on his Comedy Central show. “You’re on CNN!” Stewart yelled back. “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls! What is wrong with you?” Carlson concluded that Stewart was “more fun” on his show, and told him so. Stewart retorted that Carlson was “as big a dick” on his show as he was on any.

Stewart’s diatribe—the comedic edge of which could not mask its furious sincerity—hit a nerve. A writer for the Times likened him to Howard Beale, the “mad as hell” newsman from “Network,” and argued that he had channelled viewers’ frustrations with “gladiator-style infotainment” designed to “rile” rather than inform. The Washington Post referred to Carlson and his fellow-hosts as “Yapping Pests.” The Post also suggested that Stewart’s appearance had been a boon to “Crossfire” in terms of elevating its relevance. But a few months later CNN’s president cancelled the program, telling the press that he had agreed “wholeheartedly” with Stewart’s critique and signalling that he would shift the network’s output from “head-butting debate shows” toward “roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling.” (Carlson, incredibly from today’s vantage, moved on to MSNBC.) A top CNN journalist told the Post that “Crossfire” had come to be seen as the TV equivalent of “people asking each other if they still beat their wife.”

More recently, the format has met something of a reappraisal. In 2015, Begala reflected that, with hindsight, America could have used more noisy dissent in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Outsiders to the show have also defended it, or, at least, expressed bafflement at its punching-bag status; Ian Crouch, for instance, wrote, in this magazine, that Stewart’s takedown had come to seem “less nuanced and insightful,” and was ignorant of the reality that “true debate requires passion and theatrics as much as intellect.” By 2023, Politico’s Michael Schaffer was calling for the show’s comeback, arguing that, in a world of siloed echo chambers, the relative absence of content involving an exchange of views “might even be, um, hurting America.”

“Crossfire” has not come back. (An attempted revival in the mid-twenty-tens, featuring Gingrich and Van Jones, among others, seemed to lack bite, and scarcely lasted a year.) But the underlying idea does seem to be enjoying a resurgence. Since last year, “NewsNight,” Abby Phillip’s prime-time CNN show—which, as one media reporter put it, is often “more ‘Crossfire’ than ‘Crossfire’ ever was”—has pitted brawlers from both sides against one another, with results that are occasionally riveting (see: the journalist Catherine Rampell daring the Trump ally Scott Jennings, who had defended Elon Musk against allegations that he gave a Sieg heil, to replicate the gesture if it was so innocuous), occasionally appalling (see: the right-wing commentator Ryan Girdusky smearing the Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan as a terrorist sympathizer, ostensibly as a joke), and usually somewhere in between. Either way, people seem to be watching it.

On social media, too, angry-debate formats are very much in the Zeitgeist—an outgrowth, to no small extent, of the cocksure “Debate me!” culture of right-wing bros who rose to online prominence during Trump’s first term. Charlie Kirk perfected that form by touring college campuses, where he sparred with “woke” adversaries; this past summer, a liberal streamer known as Destiny snuck into a gathering of Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, and debated a manosphere influencer in what one attendee likened to “a cockfight.” Last year, a company called Jubilee Media launched “Surrounded,” a web show on which some flavor of provocateur (Kirk went first) is, well, surrounded by intellectual adversaries, who take turns arguing back until they are voted out by their peers. Here, too, the results can be hard to watch: when Hasan, who was born in the U.K. but is a U.S. citizen, appeared, one of his interlocutors said that he should be deported; another proudly self-identified as a fascist. But, again, people are watching. Hasan and others have said that they did “Surrounded” at the urging of their kids.

If this is a moment of heightened disputatiousness, both Phillip’s show and “Surrounded” have nonetheless been condemned, in distinctly Stewartian fashion, for handing a platform to dishonest partisan hacks more interested in wrestling than in enlightenment. (Perhaps tellingly, both shows have pitched themselves in softer terms that seem aimed at preëmpting such criticism; Jubilee’s founder has said that he is trying to build the “Disney of empathy.”) Following Hasan’s appearance on “Surrounded,” Brady Brickner-Wood wrote, in this magazine, that the show serves up “brain-eroding slop” that “offers little more to the viewer than lobotomization.” Another critique is that such content doesn’t represent the “real” country, much of which sits in some imagined moderate center, or even the work of politics, which is friendlier in the smoke-filled rooms where decisions actually get made than it is in public. “Ceasefire” is premised on shining a light into those rooms, and on modelling respectful dialogue aimed at reaching consensus on big problems.

These are noble goals. But what politicians say publicly shapes the world at least as much as behind-the-scenes chummery does. And any bipartisan ceasefire must take effect at a set of political coördinates that are not value-neutral. (Begala’s Iraq example comes to mind.) As I see it, shows like “Ceasefire” risk conflating civility with unity, or at least blur the boundaries between these two very different concepts. Disagreement doesn’t require rancor, and there are shows out there that are civil without seeking compromise; Ezra Klein’s Times podcast, on which he patiently unspools ideas with articulate opponents of his liberal world view, is one example. This type of exchange can fulfill what I consider to be the primary function of debate, which is not to represent some majority viewpoint but to stretch and stress-test ideas, including ones perceived as outlandish. As Crouch observed, though, that process is often passionate—especially when the stakes are so high.

When I started thinking about this article, the distinction between “Crossfire” and “Ceasefire” styles of debate felt metaphorical. In September, after Kirk was tragically assassinated while debating with students at Utah Valley University, that changed. Among mainstream politicians and commentators, there came urgent calls to turn down the temperature and, in the words of Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, “disagree better.” Meanwhile, Trump and his allies started to use the killing as a pretext to silence voices that they don’t like. ABC briefly suspended the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for remarks that he made about Kirk’s death, following threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission that even some Republicans later likened to the language of a Mob boss. The State Department revoked the visas of at least six people who “celebrated” Kirk’s death. A Tennessee man posted a meme highlighting Trump’s more dismissive response to a prior school shooting, and then was arrested on the spurious ground that he was threatening violence. The man was jailed for more than a month.

A debate soon emerged as to whether debate was really what Kirk had been doing. Many observers portrayed him, in the words of Katherine Kelaidis in Salon, as “a modern-day Socrates, wandering the agora of America’s universities seeking to find truth by means of rhetorical contest”; Klein wrote in the Times that Kirk had been “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” and was one of his era’s “most effective practitioners of persuasion.” This characterization, especially as posited by Klein, drew howls of outrage from many commentators on the left, who argued that Kirk wasn’t interested in changing anyone’s mind, and instead practiced a form of performance art in which he would lure less experienced debaters into rhetorical traps that he could then post online under domineering titles such as “Charlie Kirk SHUTS DOWN 3 Arrogant College Students 👀🔥”—all while dehumanizing various marginalized communities and sowing hate. Kirk’s style was “to civil discourse what porn is to sex,” Kelaidis wrote. “An intentionally titillating, vaguely degrading, commodified reproduction of something that is normally good, or at least neutral.”

While I prefer the “Crossfire” model to the “Ceasefire” model, that is not to give it carte blanche. Debates, however sharp, must take place within subjective lines. After Girdusky’s vile comments to Hasan on Phillip’s CNN show, he was gone by the end of the next ad break, then barred from the network altogether. (Less defensibly, Hasan was not invited back in the year that followed, either.) Hasan, an outstanding debater, once told me that he wouldn’t appear alongside politicians who deny basic reality; following his appearance on “Surrounded,” he said that he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known that he’d be debating fascists, whose ideology, ultimately, is incompatible with the democratic principles that underpin any form of debate. Even the far right has its boundaries; recently, a furious intra-MAGA row exploded over Carlson’s decision to interview Nick Fuentes, an open antisemite. Some of the critics took issue less with Carlson hosting Fuentes than with his failure to tear him a new one. But at least one right-winger apparently found Fuentes to be undebatable: Kirk, who banned him from T.P.U.S.A. events.

Although political violence is not as new to America as some commentators might have it, this is clearly a time for particular vigilance against calls for it, or endorsements thereof. But loud, blunt argument is not in itself threatening; indeed, to concede otherwise is to buy the logic of the chilling—not to mention deeply hypocritical—right-wing urge to censor fair, if biting, criticism of Kirk’s views after his murder. In the wake of such horrors, turning the temperature down is instinctively more appealing than keeping it high. But what if heated debate doesn’t lead to further violence? What if it’s a pressure valve that helps prevent it?

At the very least, when Jubilee, for instance, pits a self-admitted fascist against Hasan, that reflects a preëxisting current in wider society more than it creates one. And though the most appalling moments from such shows tend to go the most viral, the shows themselves are not uniformly reprehensible. I’ve watched several episodes of “Surrounded”—featuring not only Kirk and Hasan but the left-wing Cenk Uygur and right-wing Candace Owens—and been impressed by the rigor with which their positions have been examined, certainly compared with the oversimplified fare that typically gets served on cable news. The Hasan episode may have been scary at times, but it at least exposed the extent of the radicalism on the modern right, as Hasan at one point acknowledged. In an age decried for its low attention spans, such debates are also notable for their length: an hour or more, in full.

Of course, I hear you cry, the problem is precisely that the vilest clips are the ones that do go viral—a few droplets of poison extracted from a well are still, after all, poison. This is true. But the novel issue here is the ability of a handful of unaccountable social-media behemoths to determine which debates—and which parts of debates—we pay attention to. Debate itself has always had a capacity for coarseness, and to elevate contentious interlocutors (see again: Braden versus the K.K.K.); since time immemorial, people have argued not to change others’ minds, or their own, but to win. (One classicist even dubbed Socrates “the original ‘debate me’ troll.”) In this moment, left-wingers increasingly seem to have realized that the answer to modern trolls surfing debate formats to virality isn’t dissociation and containment but to get in the ring and fight back. In the context of rising authoritarianism and censorship, there is something urgent, even noble, in defending your ideas without apology.

The media companies, old and new, whose job it is to convene debates often don’t think in such ideological terms—even if their speech, too, is under threat right now. “Ceasefire,” for its part, is just one such show among many; in a marketplace of ideas, there should, indeed, be room for it. But, watching its first episodes, I wanted its guests to put their paeans to friendship aside and more rigorously challenge one another. The “Crossfire” format can be more or less edifying, but “Ceasefire” does feel limited by its coöperative premise. In this scary, divided moment, the appeal of that premise is understandable. But I’m not sure that friendly bipartisanship is what’s most at threat right now. And I worry that focussing on it whitewashes what really is.

Shortly after “Ceasefire” débuted, Stewart appeared with David Remnick, the editor of this magazine, at our annual festival, where he levelled a withering criticism against the social-media companies that he sees as dividing people—a very “Crossfire” moment, even if, this time, his targets were too powerful to take down. “Social media is ultra-processed speech, in the same way that Doritos are food,” he said. “It’s designed to bypass the parts of your brain that keep you off it, that keep you from diving into those holes, from radicalizing yourself. That’s what you’re up against. They are designing these things in the lab to bypass our ability to collaborate and coöperate.”

Later in the conversation, Stewart sounded a somewhat different note. Remnick asked him about appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which, he pointed out, has given oxygen to some “Nazi-curious” people. “It’s not acceptable to just say, ‘Well, I don’t like what he does,’ ” Stewart said. Opponents of such figures have to “beat them at their own game,” rather than complain that a noxious figure has a platform. “There’s no one in this world right now that isn’t platformed,” he said.

Stewart also recalled that he once chose to interview Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, despite viscerally opposing Rumsfeld’s role in the Iraq War. Stewart challenged Rumsfeld, but the conversation was generally cordial, and Stewart came to regret not pushing harder. “I lost more sleep over that interview than he did over the entire fucking war,” Stewart told Remnick. Afterward, Rumsfeld wrote him a note saying that the exchange was “fun,” and that the pair could have been friends when they were younger, Stewart added. “Do you have any idea how that still hurts?” ♦

It has been called “the most anticipated book of the year’s end”—a chronicle of life behind bars by the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The book’s title is “Le Journal d’un Prisonnier” (“The Journal of a Prisoner”). According to the author, it was written freehand in seven-to-eight-hour spurts from an uncomfortable chair at a flimsy desk in the twelve-square-metre cell that he occupied at La Santé prison, after being convicted in a campaign-finance scandal. His sentence began October 21st and ended less than three weeks later, on November 10th, when he was granted conditional release while appealing the verdict. In France, the book is certainly the most widely mocked and memed of the year’s end. “I didn’t even get my period twice before he finished his book,” one woman wrote on social media. “Twenty days in jail and he thinks he’s Mandela,” a YouTube commentator joked, while Libération branded him a “Wish version of Solzhenitsyn.”

The prisoner prefers a comparison to Alfred Dreyfus, writing that the similarities between their cases are “stupefying.” Spoiler: they are not. Yet, like Devil’s Island, where Dreyfus spent four years, largely in solitary confinement, La Santé is a trying environment. “Prison is louder at night than during the day,” Sarkozy writes, as evening falls. “My neighbor in the cell next door passed part of his time singing ‘The Lion King’ and the rest of it banging his spoon against the bars of the cell, creating a deafening sound.” Before his prison term began, Sarkozy announced that he had chosen to bring with him two works of literature: “The Count of Monte Cristo” and Jean-Christian Petitfils’s biography of Jesus Christ. Perhaps inspired by the stoicism of the latter, he declines to specify whether the unsolicited lullaby was “Hakuna Matata” or “Can You Feel The Love Tonight.”

The prisoner had reported to La Santé that same morning, arriving twenty-five minutes early—punctuality is “a sickness chez moi,” he writes. What’s a conscientious guy like him doing in a hall of “assassins, miscreants, and crooks of all sorts”? Surely, his plight is not the consequence of, as a Paris court found, having conspired to solicit money from the Libyan government, under the dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, in order to finance his 2007 Presidential run. Sarkozy maintains his “complete and total innocence” and insists that his downfall is the work of a shadowy clutch of enemies including the French magistrature, the investigative website Mediapart, whoever decided to strip him of his Legion of Honor knighthood, and la haine: pure, abstract hatred itself. As a protagonist, he is a marvel of passivity. “As I watched the heavy door slide along its track with solemn slowness, I reflected on the irony of the situation and on this strange life of mine,” he writes. “Why have I lived so many extreme situations?”

The intake process requires him to sign some paperwork, which he does in a dissociative state: “I initialed the documents mechanically, having decided to be elsewhere for my mental health.” This is the man who once promised to use an industrial power washer to cleanse the Paris suburbs of human “scum.” But he is gentler now, more vulnerable, or at least he would like readers—members of the media and judiciary presumably among them—to see him as such. After a full-body search, he ascends to the floor where he will be confined. “Guards upon guards dressed entirely in blue saturated the landscape,” he writes. “It was as if they’d all arranged to be there as I was passing by.” Enduring this gantlet of rubberneckers is a humiliation, but it’s also a flex. You half expect Sarkozy to bust some dance moves, as though he’s passing through the spirit tunnel on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”

Sarkozy is assigned prisoner number 320535. “Four days earlier, I had been Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of the Republic, being received by President Emmanuel Macron himself at the Élysée Palace,” he writes. “Could one ever have imagined a more striking contrast? A more ludicrous situation?” (And you thought Jean Valjean was having an identity crisis.) Sarkozy tries valiantly not to indulge in self-pity—child cancer patients have it worse, he reflects—but it is nonetheless clear that Cell No. 11 is not to his liking. In addition to the shit desk and chair, the shower is “the most incommodious” he has ever encountered, the mattress the hardest he’s ever felt, and the mirror has been hung at half height, so that he’s forced “to bend over double to fix my hair or trim my beard.” He is isolated in his cell, for safety reasons, while two bodyguards keep vigil nearby.

A longtime jogger and teetotaller, Sarkozy relies on routine to maintain his physical and mental equilibrium. He refuses to eat prison food, subsisting on yogurt, cereal bars, mineral water, apple juice, and “a few sweet treats” that he’s allowed to keep in a mini fridge. (“Neither wishing nor knowing how to cook,” he ignores the presence of a hot plate, even though a former chief of staff has been kind enough to write down instructions for boiling an egg.) Still, he has an in-room television and is allowed daily use of a treadmill; the room is “clean and rather luminous.” If it weren’t for the bars and the peephole, he writes, he might have thought he was in a “low-rent hotel.”

It's time, really, that weighs on the prisoner’s spirit. “I feared my first Sunday,” he writes. The sands running through his hourglass are missed moments with his wife, the model and singer Carla Bruni, and his four children. His third grandchild is born while he’s locked up. In nearly eighteen years of marriage, Sarkozy writes, he and Bruni had never been apart for more than a few days, and their record remains unbroken during his incarceration. (Sarkozy claims that he insisted on being treated like any other inmate, but Mediapart, the enemy website, recently reported that the French Minister of Justice intervened to give Bruni special visiting privileges.) While Sarkozy is away, a huge, mysterious bouquet of flowers is delivered daily to the couple’s home. The card invariably reads “Edmond Dantès”—the name of the dashing, unjustly imprisoned hero of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” I really hoped that our narrator was about to out himself as the perpetrator of this extravagant, kind of freaky romantic gesture. Alas, the sender was one of his friends, hoping to boost morale.

Sarkozy claims that he’s a softie, “an incurable sentimental” with a forgiving streak, but his current circumstances have forced him to reëvaluate certain things. I’m not sure where he found time to read Alexandre Dumas’s masterpiece—along with the Jesus biography, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Letter to a Hostage,” and a bit of Sartre—while also writing a book in twenty days, but the experience seems to have had a bracing effect. Dumas’s book, Sarkozy explains, “delivers a dual message. Rebirth, of course, but also vengeance.” Edmond Dantès does not forget those who’ve crossed him but, rather, “finds each of his accusers and grants them the punishment they deserve.” (Here’s hoping that works out better for Sarkozy than it did for the Count.) Let this be a warning: if you are a French magistrate and receive an invitation to a dinner party featuring mysterious liquids and exotic fish, better to decline.

“Le Journal d’un Prisonnier” is currently the No. 1 best-seller on French Amazon, edging out the forty-first volume of a series of “Astérix” comics. Hundreds of adoring supporters turned out for a signing in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, Sarkozy’s Paris fief. On purely literary merits, though, the book is, at best, a mediocris opus. Much of it reads like a padded-out term paper, replete with extraneous detail and word-count-boosting reps. We learn not once but twice, for example, that the prison guards, “many of them originating from France’s overseas territories,” never fail to address him “using the title of President.”

Other times, the book sounds like a droning Christmas-card letter, as Sarkozy endlessly tallies his friends and foes. When he writes, “I was particularly moved by the actions taken by the Bulgarian political class,” you almost wish he’d just write, “In March, Carla and I enjoyed a wonderful cruise on the Danube.” Sarkozy loves an exclamation point. He is also fond of desert metaphors, an odd choice given the particulars of the scandals marking his career. Before his alleged solicitation of Qaddafi, he enraged the families of those killed on UTA Flight 772— which Qaddafi associates bombed in 1989, sending the plane crashing into Niger’s Ténéré desert—by renewing diplomatic ties with Libya. “I lost my innocence when the man who represented France invited the dictator,” Mélanie Grisot, one of eleven relatives who testified at Sarkozy’s trial, told the court. (Sarkozy has also been convicted in two other cases, one involving campaign financing and the other illegal wiretapping.)

The book’s occasional oases of self-examination are surrounded by dusty expanses of omission and unconcern. In his political career, Sarkozy took a hard-line stance on crime, introducing mandatory-minimum sentencing and toughening rules for young offenders. “I promised myself that upon my release, I would have a more thorough and less caricatured perspective than I had in the past on all these subjects,” he writes, without offering further detail or much in the way of awakening compassion for his fellow-prisoners.

In the grand tradition of jailhouse literature, “Le Journal d’un Prisonnier” is a conversion narrative. Primed, perhaps, by Petitfils’s life of Jesus—a sort of spiritual Playboy—Sarkozy, until now an indifferent Christian, is overcome by a sudden need to “kneel down by the side of my bed.” Having discovered the power of prayer, the prisoner strikes up a relationship with a young chaplain and takes communion for the first time in years. He knows that “some will scoff at this type of sudden conversion,” but from the moment he sets foot in La Santé the evidence of divine intervention is impossible to ignore. “By a scheduling miracle, that evening there was a PSG match being broadcast on Canal+, live from Leverkusen, Germany,” he writes. He continues, “A Champions League match on my first night in prison—it was either a coincidence or another sign from Providence.” (He’s being serious.) So much for a cruise on the Danube: Sarkozy vows, “If I get out of this hell, I’ll go to Lourdes to see the sick and the desperate.”

The far more consequential conversion in “Le Journal d’un Prisonnier” is a political one. For decades, French politicians spanning from the far left to the center right have upheld a bargain known as the “republican front,” banding together in important elections, persuasions be damned, to prevent the far-right Front National, now known as the Rassemblement National, from gaining power. About midway through his account, our heretofore pliant, susceptible, and resolutely done-with-politics narrator drops a bomb: Marine Le Pen, the former president of the R.N., has been really nice about his legal troubles, and he has promised her that, come the Presidential election, in 2027, he will no longer uphold the republican front.

This defection wasn’t entirely unexpected: the billionaire businessman Vincent Bolloré, one of Sarkozy’s longtime patrons and the owner of Fayard, publisher of “Le Journal d’un Prisonnier,” has been doing his most to propel the far right to victory. But the move is unprecedented for a French President—“a crucial step in the union of the right with the far right,” as Libération put it—and Sarkozy still commands a faithful following. He hardly bothers to justify his change of heart; before you know it, he’s rattling off a compliment that Le Pen paid to Bruni, recalling the viral moment after the trial when Bruni went up to a Mediapart reporter, plucked the windscreen from his microphone, and dropped it on the floor. “She did it with remarkable class and gentleness,” Le Pen told Sarkozy. Twenty days behind bars, and not long before France may very well have a far-right head of state for the first time in nearly a century. ♦

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The Washington Roundtable discusses what surprised them in 2025, reflecting on the major shock-and-awe events that defined the first year of Donald Trump’s second term: the capitulation of major law firms, universities, and media companies; the evisceration of foreign aid; the sudden threats of war against Venezuela; and much more. The panel also considers the shape and state of resistance to Trumpism in 2025. “There is this tug-of-war going on about what kind of country we will be by the end of this process,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “It’s not just about how the big institutions will behave—it’s also about how regular people behave every day when they see things that are unbearable.”

This week’s reading:

“The Curse of Trump 2.0,” by Susan B. Glasser

“Will Trump Torpedo North American Trade?,” by Stephania Taladrid

“How the Kennedy Center Has Been Transformed by Trumpism,” by Katy Waldman

“The Trump Administration’s Chaos in the Caribbean,” by Jonathan Blitzer

“Is the Supreme Court Unsure About Birthright Citizenship?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

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Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent collection, “The New Economy,” was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, and one of their poems was included in “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” an anthology volume published this year on the occasion of the publication’s hundredth anniversary. The magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, spoke with Calvocoressi about their creative process, how poetry can help with grief, and the inspirations behind their work.

This segment mentions suicide and suicidal thoughts. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.

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